Portrait of Gertrude Stein

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Portrait of Gertrude Stein
Pablo Picasso , 1906
Oil on canvas
99.6 x 81.3 cm
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Link to the picture
(please note copyrights )

As a portrait of Gertrude Stein (Portrait of Gertrude Stein) is a painting by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso from 1906 (Zervos I, 352. DB XXI, 10) performed the in Paris living American writer and art collector Gertrude Stein shows. Stein's face, which resembles an archaic mask, points to Cubism as a form experiment .

The painting was in her possession until Gertrude Stein's death in 1946. She bequeathed it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York ; it was the first work by Picasso to enter the museum's collection.

background

Relief from Osuna, 1st century BC Chr.

From the winter of 1905/1906, after his so-called “Pink Period” , Picasso increasingly worked with formal experiments. In doing so, he drew on traditions as well as new creative means of expression, such as those shown in the 1905 exhibition by the Fauves at the Salon d'Automne in Paris. In addition to an Ingres retrospective, the autumn salon also presented ten works by Paul Cézanne , whose “approach, form and color to be used in an independent way, not in accordance with natural phenomena, but exclusively in accordance with the laws of painting”, corresponded to Picasso's own intentions. He also received impulses from Iberian works of art, excavated at Osuna in Andalusia , which the Louvre in Paris had been showing since 1903 and which Picasso recognized as an elementary and original form of expression in their so-called “primitive” and “clunky” forms.

description

J.-D. Ingres: Monsieur Bertin , 1838, Louvre , Paris

Gertrude Stein is shown in a half-portrait , sitting on an armchair indicated in the background . Picasso chose the thinker pose for his model, reminiscent of a female version of Monsieur Bertin's painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in 1838.

The hands illustrate her posture under a dark, coat-like item of clothing: She rests her right forearm on her thigh, the left hand, also propped up, lifts her shoulder. This creates a closed shape of the body, the curve of which is repeated in the backrest shown in the background. The painting is reduced in color in favor of a traditional light-dark contrast , with which the face of the portrayed, the white scarf, held by a clasp, and the hands are highlighted.

The face shows a three-quarter profile. The lines of the eyes, nose and upper lip are emphasized, giving the face the effect of a carving; the empty gaze of the eyes is reminiscent of the expression of ancient sculptures. The shadow cast by the scarf and the linearly accentuated hands pick up on this shape, albeit painted more traditionally, and continue it with the intention of creating a contrast between the sharp, light center of the face, the scarf and hands and the poorly defined, dark body in front of it vaguely suggested background.

Emergence

Gertrude Stein in her salon, 1905. In the center is a version of Cézanne's bathers .

The writer and art collector Gertrude Stein first visited Picasso together with her brother Leo in 1905 in his Paris studio in the Bateau-Lavoir . She not only valued and bought his works, but was also fascinated by his personality. When Picasso, who had already begun portraits of Leo and her nephew Allan Stein, suggested painting them too, she happily agreed.

The portrait was created since the end of 1905 in a series of sessions in Picasso's studio - according to different statements made by the portrayed later, it was 80 or 90 - in which the painter took the corpulence of the American art collector and poet as an opportunity to deal freely with the forms .

Gertrude Stein describes the frequent sessions in Picasso's studio for her portrait in her book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas : “There was a couch where everyone sat and slept, there was a small kitchen chair on which Picasso sat while painting a large easel and there were many pictures and there was a little fox terrier… ”So that she wouldn’t get bored, Picasso's companion Fernande Olivier read to her from the Fables of La Fontaine .

Félix Vallotton: Portrait of Gertrude Stein , 1907

In the spring of 1906 Picasso completed the work in an initial phase, but was dissatisfied with the execution of the face of his portrait. Stein described the situation in her autobiography as follows: “One day he suddenly painted the whole head. I don't see you at all anymore, he explained irritably. “Work on the portrait was then interrupted. Shortly before a vacation stay, which he spent together with Fernande Olivier in Gósol, Spain, in May 1906, he painted over the face and completed it after returning in the autumn of the same year without Stein having sat model again . Stein found Picasso's work very successful and later summed up: "The only picture of me in which I always am I for myself."

A year later, in 1907, Félix Vallotton asked to be allowed to portray Gertrude Stein. She felt flattered and said yes. The result - based on Picasso's portrait - did not seem to have pleased her, because in the numerous photographs of the salon of the siblings Leo and Gertrude Stein at 27 Rue de Fleurus in Paris, which she later took with Alice B. Toklas , was Vallottons In contrast to Picasso's depiction, the portrait cannot be seen. Vallotton's portrait of the stone, which he depicted like a female Buddha with a long necklace made of lapis lazuli and malachite, is in the collection of the Cone Collection in Baltimore.

classification

Self-portrait with a palette
Pablo Picasso , 1906
Oil on canvas
92 × 73 cm
Philadelphia Museum of Art (AE Gallatin Collection), Philadelphia

Link to the picture
(please note copyrights )

The portrait of Gertrude Stein, together with the self-portrait with Palette, which was also created in 1906, is seen as the high point of Picasso's exploration of the human figure since 1905, in which he deliberately disregarded proportion and form in search of an “independent character of painting”. The block-like, irregular shape of the head, together with the eyes and nose, which appear to be attached, avoids the appearance of a living person being depicted, in favor of a cohesion of the surfaces that creates its own painterly shape.

Picasso pursued this approach in a number of studies, especially in the treatment of his own face. The radical depiction in the self-portrait from spring 1907 , which emphasizes the black line , already hinted at in the portrait of Gertrude Stein, illustrates the design fund from which the Demoiselles d'Avignon emerged in the summer of 1907, which marked the beginning of a new style called Cubism , marked.

After the painting of Gertrude Stein, his patron , whom he counted as part of the avant-garde and who inspired him to new paths, Picasso only chose motifs from women who, in one way or another, with his wives or partners as a result of his amorous relationships to deal with them.

Presence in the Stein plant

Gertrude Stein, 1934, photograph by Carl Van Vechten

Gertrude Stein wrote “literary portraits” of her friends and acquaintances. In their partly alienated form, the portraits were based on the Cubist works of their artist friends, Picasso in particular inspired them. In her Picasso portrait from around 1909 she wrote about his new style of painting: "[...] it certainly had emerged from him, certainly it was something, certainly it had emerged from him and it had a meaning [...]"

In Gertrude Stein's autobiographical story The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas from 1933, in which Stein lets her friend Alice act as the first-person narrator and depicts herself in the third person, Alice tells of a socializing at Stein's, where Picasso is also present . Alice tells Picasso that she likes the portrait of the lady of the house. Picasso replies that everyone thinks it doesn't look like it, but that doesn't matter: it will. The passage from Stein's work became an independent anecdote from its source , for example in the description of the painting on the official website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art .

In the mid-1920s, Stein had her hair cut very short. What happened when she met Picasso afterwards, she described in her autobiography : "Picasso exclaimed:" Gertrude, what is, what is ". "What's what, Pablo," she said. "Let me see," he said. She let him see. "And my portrait," he said seriously. Then he added with a milder expression, mais, quand même, tout y est , nevertheless everything is there. "

In her depictions of Picasso , published in 1938, Gertrude Stein tells of a rich collector who asked her how much she had paid for her portrait. Her answer was: “nothing” that deeply shook the collector. You've told them Picasso, who found the reaction understandable, since that time, as Picasso, according to Stein, the difference between sales and Gift insignificant ( negligible ) was.

reception

The mask-like face

The French writer Pierre Daix , who had known Picasso, referred to a possible key to changing the in his essay Portraiture in Picasso's Primitivism and Cubism , published in 1996 for the exhibition Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation at the Museum of Modern Art , New York Facial features in the portrait of Stein. Gertrude Stein was Picasso's preliminary completion of the portrait with the exhibition at the Salon des Independants launched in March 1906 in connection when he there the monumental painting joy (Le bonheur de vivre) by Henri Matisse saw that acquired the stone. Picasso, who had met Matisse in Stein's salon, may have felt challenged by the older painter and, as a result, removed Stein's classically perfect facial features in the style of Ingres. In Spain that summer he saw the so-called Gósol Madonna, a colorfully painted sculpture from the 12th century with a mask-like face. He then made studies for which Fernande Olivier was his model. When he returned to Paris, he applied the new stylistic insights into the mask-like features of the portrait, thus creating the image of a woman of the avant-garde with Stein's portrait.

At the 2010 exhibition, Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum , in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the changes in the face over the course of the many sessions were made clear through the use of x-rays and other technical examinations, and it was also mentioned that the too Poor artists at that time had used an already painted canvas for the portrait, which showed a landscape painting.

Exhibitions 2011/2012

On the occasion of the 65th year of death of the writer - after a first exhibition entitled The Steins Collect in May / June 2011 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art - the exhibition opened in October 2011 in the Grand Palais in Paris, dedicated to art collectors Gertrude, Leo, Michael and was dedicated to Sarah Stein. Until January 16, 2012, it showed around 200 exhibits under the title Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso ... L'aventure des Stein , which were in the possession of the collector family, including Gertrude Stein's portrait of Picasso. The exhibition was then taken over by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from February to June 2012 .

Valloton's painting The Stone was featured in the Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Lives exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC from October 2011 to early 2012 . Together with Francis Picabia's painting of the writer from 1933 and a terracotta sculpture by Jo Davidson and photographs - for example by Man Ray - it formed part of the artistic representation under the motto Story 1: Picturing Gertrude .

Further representations of artists and writers can be found under Gertrude Stein: Testimonials from writers and artists .

literature

  • Siegfried Gohr : I don't look, I find. Pablo Picasso - Life and Work . DuMont, Cologne 2006, ISBN 978-3-8321-7743-0
  • William Rubin : Pablo Picasso. A Retrospective, with 758 plates, 208 in color, and 181 reference illustrations , The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Thames and Hudson, London 1980, ISBN 0-500-27194-1 (German: Pablo Picasso. Retrospective im Museum of Modern Art, New York. Prestel, Munich 1980)
  • Gertrude Stein: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas . Harcourt, Brace, New York 1933; German autobiography by Alice B. Toklas , from the American by Roseli Bontjes van Beek and Saskia Bontjes van Beek. Arche, Hamburg 2006, ISBN 978-3-716-02348-8
  • Gertrude Stein: Picasso . Libraire Floury, Paris; Batsford, London 1938; Charles Scribner's Sons, New York 1940; German Picasso. All texts 1908–1938 , from the American by Roseli Bontjes van Beek and Saskia Bontjes van Beek. Arche, Hamburg 2003, ISBN 978-3-7160-2314-3
  • Carsten-Peter Warncke: Pablo Picasso. 1881-1973 . Two volumes, ed. by Ingo F. Walther, Cologne 1991. Volume I: Works 1890−1936 , pp. 143–153, ISBN 3-8228-0425-8
  • Christian Zervos : Catalog Raisonné des Œuvres de Pablo Picasso, 1895–1973 , Éditions Cahiers d'Art , Paris (33 volumes)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Christian Zervos: Catalog Raisonné des Œuvres de Pablo Picasso, 1895–1973 , Éditions Cahiers d'Art, Paris
  2. ^ Carsten-Peter Warncke: Pablo Picasso (vol. 1, 1991), p. 143
  3. ↑ Siegfried Gohr: I'm not looking, I find , p. 61
  4. ↑ Brenda Wineapple: Sister Brother Gertrude and Leo Stein . Arche, Zurich-Hamburg 1998, ISBN 3-7160-2233-0 , p. 332 f.
  5. ↑ Quoted from Ursula von Kardorff: Adieu Paris , Rowohlt, Reinbek 1993, ISBN 3-499-13159-5 , p. 36
  6. ^ Siegfried Gohr: I'm not looking, I find , pp. 59–61
  7. ^ William Rubin: Pablo Picasso. A Retrospective, with 758 plates, 208 in color, and 181 reference illustrations . The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Thames and Hudson, London 1980, p. 59
  8. ↑ Brenda Wineapple: Sister Brother Gertrude and Leo Stein , p. 488
  9. ^ Museum of Modern Art , sfmoma.org, accessed on December 26, 2011. Photo from Stein's salon around 1933/34 with Picasso's portrait.
  10. ↑ Ellen B. Hirschland, Nancy H. Ramage: The Cone Sisters of Baltimore: Collecting at Full Filt . Northwestern Univ. Pr. 2008, ISBN 978-0-8101-2481-3 , p. 53
  11. ↑ National Portrait Gallery ( Memento of May 13, 2012 in the Internet Archive ): Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Lives , accessed on December 26, 2011
  12. ^ Carsten-Peter Warncke: Pablo Picasso (vol. 1, 1991), p. 144
  13. ↑ Carsten-Peter Warncke: Pablo Picasso (vol. 1, 1991), p. 144 f.
  14. ^ Carsten-Peter Warncke: Pablo Picasso (vol. 1, 1991), p. 153
  15. ↑ Hilton Cramer: Picasso: portraits or masks? , www.newcriterion.com, accessed December 29, 2011
  16. ↑ Andrea Weiss: Paris was a woman , p. 54
  17. ↑ Brenda Wineapple: Sister Brother Gertrude and Leo Stein , p. 332
  18. ↑ According to: Annegeret Heitmann (among others): Bi – Textualität. Productions by the couple . ( Gender difference & literature , vol. 12) Berlin 2001, p. 85
  19. ↑ : "When someone commented that Stein did not look like her portrait, Picasso replied, She will ." Metropolitan Museum of Art, Description
  20. ^ Gertrude Stein: Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas , p. 78
  21. ^ Gertrude Stein: Picasso . London 1938. Reprinted by Mineola, NY 1984, p. 8
  22. ↑ Hilton Cramer: Picasso: portraits or masks? , www.newcriterion.com, accessed December 29, 2011
  23. ↑ Mark Pitzcke: Picasso's newest revelations , www.spiegel.de, accessed on January 2, 2012
  24. ↑ The stone Collect , www.metmuseum.org, accessed on August 13, 2012
  25. ↑ National Portrait Gallery : Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Lives. Story 1: Picturing Gertrude , accessed December 26, 2011

Illustrations

  1. ^ Photo of Gertrude Stein in her salon and Picasso's portrait, 1930
  2. ^ Pablo Picasso: Self-Portrait , Paris, spring 1907. Oil on canvas, 50 × 46 cm (Zervos II *, 8; DR 25). Národni Gallery , Prague
  3. ↑ Illustration of the Gósol Madonna
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